Monday, December 06, 2004

Monday's Musings

Last night our youth group hosted our 3rd contemplative worship gathering. It went really really well. Several youth groups from the Nashville area came which made it quite an event. My partner in crime Gavin and his youth group helped plan and pull the worship off. In fact if you check out his site, http://gavoweb.blogs.com, you can see pictures from it. It was a beautiful Advent worship, with multiple prayer stations, art, poetry, contemplative music. Very fun, and very prayerful, or prayer-filled.

I just started reading through Robert Webber's book, Ancient-Future Time. The premise of this book is shaping our spiritual lives through the traditional Christian Year. I've thumbed through the entire book and like the way he sets it up. Each chapter he visits a Christian season- Advent, Christmas, Lent, The 3 Great Days, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time- and talks about the significance of each season and how the season can uniquely inform our spiritual formation as Christians.

The other emphasis that I like about this book is that the Christian Calendar represents the countercultural nature of the Christian Community. By living our lives based around the Christian Calendar we show ourselves as unique and different to the culture at large- it is another way to show that we are resident aliens in a foreign land.

I look forward to reading this book and seeing where it will take me in my exploration of a faith rooted in scripture, tradition, reason and experience.

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